Breaking down mystical practice and crafting new ritual tech from primary source texts.

Hermes: Feel Safe To Find Your Center

Note on this: I’m having a hard time with thinking clearly about how to deal with literal, swastika-flag flying Nazis in my country. I’m Jewish, I have ancestors who died at the hands of the last people who carried that symbol, and I’m enraged. Impassioned thinking isn’t the best, so I’ve been in conversation with Hermes for the last few weeks.

I don’t feel comfortable publishing all of that conversation. It’s long. It’s expletive-laden. It’s one of those circumstances where you can really see the veneer of modern deity fall completely off of him. It’s more vulnerable than I want to be. It’s more vulnerable than I want him to be, too.

This part, however, seemed like it might be really useful to people. Here, he dishes on a technique for consecrating your space so as to facilitate the protective presence of a deity (or deities).

Hermes: You need to first feel safe, in order to get centered. And you need to be centered to do any other kind of magic.

Start with your home. Consecrate the place you live to spiritual allies whom you trust. You have deities and spirits whom you know will go to bat for you. Let me repeat that: your gods will go to bat for you. You can facilitate that by consecrating your home to us.

Following all the ritual edicts associated with a proper temenos is… with all due respect to Comrade Themis, on the side of impractical. What with all the living and fucking and dying you do. And really, consecrating a temenos is really just about setting aside a place where you don’t do things like that, which is pretty damned unhelpful. I’ll give you an alternative.

I’m going to start with the assumption that you have a shrine to your household deities or at least a shrine to your household deity.

First, you choose a stone that represents the deity to you. A rose quartz for Aphrodite, a citrine for Apollon, a carnelian for Ares.

Next: place that stone beside the icon, and say whatever prayers you are accustomed to say. Ask particularly for protection, and as a part of your prayer, ask the deity to consecrate the stone to that purpose. You, Thenea, have like 85 Hermai all over your home. Any single one of the constituent stones would work for what I’m about to suggest.

Then: Place the stone in water overnight. In the morning, sprinkle the desired area or areas with said water.

While doing this, say a prayer, such as, “My Lady Athena, by these waters, I consecrate this space to you, that you should watch over it, and me.”

You can also consecrate something you will wear, and take the protective power of the deity with you.

15 thoughts on “Hermes: Feel Safe To Find Your Center”

I also have Jewish ancestry, as well as German ancestry (and other things, too)…and it surprises me how often people who are polytheists confuse me wanting to honor the former with somehow buying into the “Abrahamic God,” which it is not by any stretch of the imagination…oh well.

In any case, this is brilliant, and thanks (as well as thanks to Hermes!) for sharing it!

It’s also amazing how many people accept that Diana isn’t Artemis, despite Roman claims to the contrary, but totally buy that the Jewish tribal deity is the same as the Christian straw man “father.”

The two deities have a different character, different aims, different cultures, different requirements, and DON’T EVEN HAVE THE SAME GENDER.

Moreover, the Inquisition was far more about killing Jews than it was about converting Polytheists or witches.

There is no “Abrahamic God.” It’s a lie perpetrated by the Christian hegemony.

The Hebrew god would not be caught dead in a church.

Just because Christianity burned you doesn’t mean that Jewish culture is evil. If all you’ve ever read is the “Torah” you haven’t read even a tenth of Jewish mythos, nor do you understand what you’ve read.

But please, anonymous people whom I am referencing, use your bad experience with Baptists and Pentecostals and Catholics as an excuse for Antisemitism. *RAGH*

It might help reduce the confusion if they started referring to their god by name, and not being all afraid of taking it in vain. It’s a pretty lame excuse, really; if you don’t want to take it in vain, don’t. I’m pretty sure your deity can figure out what to do with transgressors of that commandment.

It’s actually a matter of the Jews having a concept of ritual purity and temenos not dissimilar to that of the Greeks. The name is holy enough that it should only be said inside the temenos of the deity, under circumstances of ritual purity.

Also, as soon as we say a name for the Hebrew deity, the Christians immediately seize it, use it, and insist they are worshipping the Hebrew deity, which has been going on forever. So no, it wouldn’t reduce confusion.

Which would be fine if they didn’t also use this claim to try to retrofit our deity into their incompatible theology, claim that we simply had it wrong the whole time, and then use this claim justify their mistreatment of us.

You aren’t alone in being sickened and frightened by the recent upsurge. I think it strips us all down to the fight-flight instinct, and mine is definitely the ‘get my gun and kill them all’ reaction, although I know that I can’t become a vigilante. Thanks for posting the ritual, and please know that in case of trouble not just the gods will have your back.